I’m building a customizable theme right now based on Condé Naste’s magazine themes, more specifically it’s a mixture of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair’s website themes.
I’ll have the beta up in a couple weeks. It will be chock full of customization using a number of custom fields. The most interesting and unique piece of this theme, which I will be calling Black Widow, is each page’s customization abilities. Using only custom fields, you will be able to set up an entire page without any code. If you look at the The New Yorker’s pages you’ll see that on each one the left column and the right column are the same. The middle column, however, is different. Every middle section has a number of elements. In Black Widow you will be able to define up to 10 elements per page.
This theme will be great for small to large magazines looking for scalable solutions. It will come preloaded with plugins that will need to be activated in order to make the theme work as it should. When I release the beta, I will also release all the information for customizing the theme. So far as I can tell, this theme will be the most comprehensive magazine theme since Mimbo. The theme will be free but for one restriction. I ask that should you use the theme, you keep my single ad on the top, or in another region (I will release three versions with 1 ad in 3 different spots). It should not be hard. In the next few days I’ll be posting pictures of my progress.
